Gender Roles in Sandra Cisneros' and Maxine Hong Kingston's Books

Gender Roles in Sandra Cisneros' and Maxine Hong Kingston's Books

697 WordsFeb 1st, 20183 Pages

The authors' collective works highlight the struggle of women from historically-discriminated minorities to celebrate their cultures, even while acknowledging these cultures' patriarchal imperfections.
In The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, the reader is able to see how the anxieties about becoming adult women afflict the lives of young, Hispanic girls, particularly the poor, proud intelligent narrator Esperanza. In Esperanza's world, her Hispanic culture demands that women be sexual, yet punishes them for being so. In one scene, Esperanza and her friends speculate about how they need hips to make babies and try to laugh about their budding femininity, which seems, in the novel to be fraught with peril. In another scene they try on a pair of high heels for fun, which they eventually discard because of the unwanted attention this garners. The examples of women who lose their freedom because of love and marriage are many in the novel, such as Rafaela, who is locked in her apartment and can only communicate with the outside world through her…

Throughout The House on Mango Street Esperanza learns to resist the gender norms that are deeply imbedded in her community. The majority of the other female characters in the novel have internalized the male viewpoint and they believe that it is their husbands or fathers responsibility to care for them and make any crucial decisions for them. However, despite the influence of other female characters that are “immasculated”, according to Judith Fetterley, Esperanza’s experiences lead her to become…

Quest for Identity in Maxine Hong Kingston's Autobiography, The Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiography, The Woman Warrior, features a young Chinese-American constantly searching for "an unusual bird" that would serve as her impeccable guide on her quest for individuality (49). Instead of the flawless guide she seeks, Kingston develops under the influence of other teachers who either seem more fallible or less realistic. Dependent upon their guidance, she grows under the influence…

Impact of Chinese Heritage on Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior
"Haunted by the power of images? I do feel that I go into madness and chaos. There's a journey of everything falling apart, even the meaning and the order that I can put on something by the writing." —Maxine Hong Kingston
It is true that some dream in color, and some dream in black and white. Some dream in Sonic sounds, and some dream in silence. In Maxine Hong Kingston's literary works, the readers enter a soundless…

Maxine Hong Kingston's No Name Woman
"A highly fictive text [whose non-fiction label gives] the appearance of being an actual representation of Asian American experience in the broader public sphere."
(Gloria Chun, "The High Note")
Such a disparaging remark about the misleading nature of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior has been readily refuted, notably by Leilani Nishime, who proposes in her essay "Engendering Genre..." that it is a text that transcends genre confines; it challenges…

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston's novel, The Woman Warrior is a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories that chronicles her childhood in California. It gives the reader a feeling of how it feels like to be a Chinese American girl growing up with traditional parents in a world that is quite different from…

Gender Role Reversal?
Conventional sexual normative values for males typically include an emphasis of attributes that include self-reliance, dominance, assertion, and a healthy appetite for heterosexual behavior. By contrast, those that apply to females usually include a submissiveness and dependency that is all too oftentimes easily exploited by men. In this respect, the body of literature analyzed within this paper--Sandra Cisneros' "Bien Pretty" and "Anguiano Religious Articles" in Woman Hollering…

Maxine Hong Kingston's No Name Woman
A person's identity cannot be given to her, instead a person must achieve a sense of her character through personal experience and self-reflection. In "No Name Woman", Maxine Hong Kingston recalls the events of her aunt's life in the vague world of her Chinese roots. The story of her aunt is told by her mother and Kingston recreates the events into an exploratory story to help herself figure out what part of her identity is Chinese and help her better understand…

Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior
Food strengthens us, without it we are weak. Eating has always been an important factor with families living in poor conditions. Often, those who could not help to produce more food are considered inferior or unworthy to eat. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is no exception, due to the relation it creates between eating and the strength of people. This is shown through the tale of Fa-Mu-Lan, the story of the eaters, and the references to the…

As newer generations take on the responsibility of passing down their people’s history and culture, ancestral costumes are maintained but altered to suit current social standards. Through Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiography The Woman Warrior, a memoir of myths and her mother’s narratives, the author is given a sense of empowerment as she discovers her own identity and, thus, her place in the world. Growing up, Kingston struggled with her dual heritage, not knowing whether to follow her family’s…

Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior - No Name Woman
The excerpt, "No Name Woman", from Maxine Hong Kingston's book, Woman Warrior, gives insight into her life as a Chinese girl raised in America through a tragic story of her aunt's life, a young woman raised in a village in China in the early 1900s. The story shows the consequences beliefs, taught by parents, have on a child's life. Kingston attempts to figure out what role the teachings of her parents should have on her life, a similar attempt…